November 11, 2010

Second Life attachment points


New fashion release from Inga Wind shows limitations of SL avatar attachment points.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, Inga Wind is a friend and my fave designer. When I got her latest release, Cosette, I fell crazy in love with it simply based on the package photo!

When I put it on, I was blown away. How would you describe it? Professional? Yes. Perky? Very. German hofbrau? Kinda. Totally cute? Definitely!

The outfit includes everything you see in the photo. Skirt, top, glitch pants, belt, sleeve ruffles, shoes and a prim bow for the bodice. The total price is $350L or, $150L for her group members -- a total bargain!

However, in trying to do the photo shoot of the outfit for this blog post, I started going crazy because the belt would "dig" into the skirt with some of the fashion model poses that move your hips sideways. So, I started playing with the belt trying to see if I couldn't make it behave better with my hip-shifts!

After 15 minutes of fooling around, I moved the belt to the spine and the bow the "left pec". For my fashion shots, it all worked fine that way. In fact, I thought to myself, wow, this is how it should be.

So I went to see Inga in person to show her what I'd done. After turning on my AO and standing in front of her, she (very graciously) pointed out that now the bow was moving up and down the dress as I breathed! Ughh. Plus, when my AO switched to a different stand, the belt was now digging into my stomach which looked awful! I had solved one problem for my photo shoot but created two new ones that didn't work for normal wear. :P 

Bottom line, Inga HAD indeed picked the best attachment points in the first place. She has tried the different spots I had and what comes out of the box is the best you can do given the limitations of Second Life. Normally belts and skirts are linked together so they move as one. However, the outfit is designed so the belt rides higher, almost like a mini-corset. That means it can't be part of the skirt or it would move completely outside your body with any twisting or shifting motion. Sigh.

Anyway, it's a gorgeous outfit and only those terminally picky and slightly anal retentive people like me would ever notice this stuff. :P

November 7, 2010

What's in your SPAM folder??

This is sort of an off-the-wall topic. You see I actually bothered to look in my Gmail Spam folder today for my Second Life email account and for my throwaway real life account. I don't think I've checked either for maybe a month. I was surprised to find that, in both accounts, 90% of the ads were for male enhancement products with the remaining 10% for Canadian pharmacies.

Since Gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, I'm not as reluctant to give out my Gmail addys as I am with my professional personal email. So I'm not surprised that I end up with a fair amount of spam. I've read that spammers try to guess your email address on Gmail using names they find by searching on the net. So if you're "Snickers Snook", they try every variation including snickers_snook, snickerssnook, snickers.snook, snickers-snook, snook-snickers, etc. which in my case, happens to work for my SL account.

It doesn't quite work for my RL Gmail account although my name is part of the address. However, both accounts have clearly female names (well OK Snickers might be a little ambiguous). Yet, both accounts are mostly filled with ads designed for men with serious inferiority complexes, stupid streaks and / or excess money.

On the other hand (or body part), I can't recall ever seeing a spam for breast enlargement. Oh I get a few here and there for diets, wrinkle creams, random household products, African money schemes, lotteries and porn. But the ratio of male-oriented stuff drowns out everything else. Does that mean women are smarter than guys about this stuff so spams targeting females don't work as well? Or are there lots of women who buy online Viagra and penis enlargement pills for their BF's or husbands?? (Here honey, I got these pills for you for my birthday.)

Now spam in my RL professional account is very different from Gmail stuff. There I get mostly pitches for seminars, unreadable foreign language emails, African money schemes and lotteries with few, if any, male-oriented pitches. Weird that they're so different in content. Maybe it's a difference in filtering?

So I'm curious. What's in your spam folder?

November 3, 2010

More aDiva Stuffa

Just to show that I can still acknowledge a good outfit in spite of the mistreatment I may have received by its creator, I wore AnneJoy Paine's "Blood Red Bitch" outfit to a large Halloween party in SL the other night. I received several compliments on it but especially on the cape. To the one person who really wanted to know where I got it, I gave him a LM to her shop. :P